It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign -- that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep's parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.

This isn't a surprising choice. It was fact-checking operating more or less as it was meant to.
Romney's ad, a desperation move in the closing days of the campaign, and clearly false, was reported as such, and may even have backfired with its intended audience. But it also shows the limits of the fact check. Clear-cut falsehoods are relatively rare. Political discourse is full of half-truths and insinuations. And there, fact-checking often founders (as Politifact did with the 2011 Lie of the Year, taking us down a semantic rabbit-hole about the meaning of "ending Medicare").

Don't get me wrong: whether or not it holds politicians to account or changes their behavior, fact-checking is, in general, a positive development. Its adoption by various media has vested traditional journalism practices with new authority to call out lies and distortions. But outside its narrow mission statement, fact-checking cannot address larger, more complex questions such as "which side is worse?" That question is dangerous for media constantly under attack for bias, real or perceived, so the temptation has been to pretend it doesn't exist or shunt it back to the fact-checkers. Brendan Nyhan argues that it's ridiculous to place such a burden on fact-checking. Instead, journalists should be willing to engage the "who's worse" issues and other broad questions about the political system:

We should integrate factchecking into the practice of political journalism more generally, which will allow for consideration of broader perspectives on accuracy and polarization than are possible in the factchecking format. (See, for instance, Dana Milbank’s groundbreaking and controversial October 2002 piece in The Washington Post on President Bush’s pattern of misleading statements.) When combined with continued effort to avoid false equivalence and artificial balance, journalists can hopefully account for asymmetry when it exists in a fair way that respects journalistic norms.

Given the experience of Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, it's not clear that journalists are willing to acknowledge asymmetry in politics, let alone explain it. There are some exceptions but the default assumption remains "both sides do it." But this is a process.